Nostalgia and the End of the Roman Empire

The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the longest running historical stories and debates for the last 1,500 years. Stories about the fall of Rome tend to reach one of two conclusions: either the empire was destroyed in a wave of barbarian invasions or it collapsed internally due to structural problems. Wherever a particular narrative falls, local people are said to survive through resilience, resistance or accommodation. This talk flips the narrative around to focus on individuals and communities in southern France and how they built their lives at a regional, local, and urban level instead of focusing on a central empire as they had been for centuries. The talk reveals that as these communities became more localized in their outlook, they still drew from the same existing resources of what it meant to be a Roman. But diminished contact with each other at imperial centers transformed how they thought about and implemented these resources over time. It demonstrates that, in the end, nostalgia for a singular idea of what being Roman meant is, perhaps ironically, what led to clashes between communities and, eventually, new ways of living that were no longer Roman. It was the persistence of Roman exceptionalism that led to end of being Roman.